Nov 15, 2011

NVIDIA Maximus Revolutionizes the Workstation

After 25 years of design and creative professionals anticipating a workstation that simultaneously performs complex analysis and visualization, NVIDIA announced today its arrival, with the introduction of NVIDIA® Maximus™ technology.

The new offering unleashes productivity and creativity, dramatically accelerating work by enabling a single system for the first time to simultaneously handle interactive graphics and the compute-intensive number crunching associated with the simulation or rendering of the results. These previously needed to be done in separate steps or on separate systems.

NVIDIA Maximus achieves this by bringing together the professional 3D graphics capability of NVIDIA Quadro® professional graphics processing units (GPUs) with the massive parallel-computing power of the NVIDIA Tesla™ C2075 companion processor—under a unified technology that transparently assigns work to the right processor and is certified by industry leading application vendors.

“To those of us who have spent their careers focused on workstations, NVIDIA Maximus represents a revolution,” said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions Group, NVIDIA. “Previous workstation architectures forced designers and engineers to do compute-intensive work and graphics-intensive work serially and often offline. They can now do them at the same time, on the same machine, allowing professionals to explore more ideas faster and converge quickly on the best possible answers.”

With NVIDIA Maximus-enabled applications – such as those from Adobe, ANSYS, Autodesk, Bunkspeed, Dassault Systèmes and MathWorks – GPU compute work is assigned to run on the NVIDIA Tesla companion processor. This frees up the NVIDIA Quadro GPU to handle graphics functions, ensuring the quality and performance demanded by professional users.

“The real advantage of the Maximus technology is flexibility and increased productivity,” said Tim Ong, vice president of Mechanical Engineering for Sunnyvale, CA-based Liquid Robotics. “Allowing each engineer to do multiple things at once is transformative for our workflow. It’s a tremendous tool to allow my engineers to be flexible, to multitask, and to be more productive because they’re not waiting on computational power.”

Product Design, Styling and Visualization“Autodesk’s 3ds Max 2012 has received top scores by reviewers, and one of the reasons they cite is the new iray photorealistic renderer from NVIDIA. We’ve taken this to another level with our announcement of the ActiveShade integration with iray – giving our subscription users an interactive rendering experience – especially if they are using an NVIDIA Quadro GPU, or the new NVIDIA Maximus solution that’s up to 9X faster than a single CPU.”

-Ken Pimentel, director, Media Design, Autodesk

“Bunkspeed PRO 2012 combines Bunkspeed Shot PRO and Bunkspeed Move PRO into one easy to use interactive ray tracing package built on CUDA powered NVIDIA iray. NVIDIA Maximus powered workstations allow designers, engineers, marketers and architects to render their 3D models with Bunkspeed PRO up to 8x faster than on CPUs alone, with a whole new level of realism and interactivity.”

-Philip Lunn, founder and CEO, Bunkspeed

“By harnessing the power of GPU computing we have been able to create a more productive, high-performance, interactive user experience and, at the same time, dramatically increase the realism of visualization tools available for designers and engineers within CATIA V6. With NVIDIA Maximus, users will be able to experience the full power of these new visualization tools in their product design workflow.”

-Xavier Melkonian, director, CATIA Shape Domain, Dassault Systèmes

Engineering Simulation“GPU computing can dramatically accelerate ANSYS engineering software simulations on workstations, in some cases doubling the number of simulations that can be considered and helping customers to adopt more pervasive use of engineering simulation. With NVIDIA Maximus platforms widely available, enterprises can now more easily take advantage of ANSYS at their desk for both interactive and computationally intensive tasks.”

-Bill Roberts, director of professional video and audioproduct management, Adobe

Technical Computing“MATLAB users want to take advantage of GPUs to achieve significant speed-up of their applications quickly and easily, without making major changes to their MATLAB code. The wide availability of pre-qualified NVIDIA Maximus systems for MATLAB gives our users access to commodity platforms that deliver great productivity.”

-Loren Dean, director of Engineering, MATLAB Products, MathWorks

Workstation OEMs

“HP’s Z Workstations meet the needs of some of the most compute-intensive industries in the world. With NVIDIA Maximus technology, HP is providing a powerful, new performance solution that will enable our customers to design and analyze more efficiently, ultimately increasing ROI.”